The 50 most inspiring buildings in Britain

From St Pancras to Stonehenge, Lloyd's of London to Hadrian's Wall, Telegraph architecture critic Ellis Woodman picks the structures that define the nation

1 Laban Centre, London (Herzog and de Meuron, 2003)

Herzog and de Meuron's conversion of Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern may be their best-known project in the UK, but this dance school in Deptford is the more assured work. Its translucent skin strikes a knowing relationship to the industrial sheds that characterise this down-at-heel corner of the capital. The interior, however, is of such spatial variety that it brings to mind a city in miniature.

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By building high, the architects give weary-eyed visitors views over the town - and give their building a presence on the skyline comparable with Walsall's other, principally 19th-century, civic monuments. The collection on display was drawn largely from a private bequest and the galleries are scaled to reflect the domestic environment in which it was formerly shown.

3 Lisson Gallery, London (Tony Fretton, 1992)

What distinguishes this commercial gallery in west London is its democratic relationships to the extremely varied surroundings. The principal facade is modelled in response both to the Georgian house alongside and to the Seventies tower block further down the street. A huge first-floor window faces towards a post-war school 50m away, drawing it, the intervening playground and the contents of the gallery into a remarkable composition.

4 Lloyd's of London, London

(Richard Rogers Partnership, 1986)

Quite why the headquarters of an insurance institution should look like an oil refinery, you may well ask, but for its barmy exuberance alone, Lloyd's deserves a place on this list. This is architecture that makes a great play of its adaptability - hence the key gesture of placing lifts and services outside so that they could be changed. But but when a campaign was launched this year to have the building Grade I listed - ie, everything would have to stay how it is - no one heard Lord Rogers complaining.

5 Robinson College, Cambridge (Gillespie Kidd and Coia, 1980)

Colleges tend to adhere to one of two types - the classic quad or the campus of freestanding buildings - but Robinson is neither. A single brick building, it has a castle-like presence in its suburban setting. The skill with which the architects have imposed a sense of hierarchy on an extraordinary variety of spaces lies at the root of its success.

This council housing in St John's Wood reasserts the terraced house as a viable high-density housing model. The long street around which the scheme is organised takes its curving form from the adjacent railway line but brings to mind the grand urban compositions with John Nash transformed London in the 19th century.

This short-lived partnership aimed to design each building in a style that reflected its use. Their final project reflected “the engineering style” in feats of structural bravura, such as the cantilevering of the two auditoria beyond the body of the tower. A declaration of war against the predominant culture of dour functionalism, it proved wildly influential.

8 Economist Building, London (Alison and Peter Smithson, 1964)

This ensemble of three towers rising from a podium brings the influence of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago skyscrapers to St James’s, one of London’s most treasured conservation areas.

Maintaining the streetline and employing Portland stone cladding, rich in fossil deposits, the three blocks frame a raised yard that is one the most compelling public spaces in London.

9 Royal Festival Hall, London (London County Council Architects’ Department, 1951)

Created as the focal point of the Festival of Britain, the Royal Festival Hall embodied aspirations for a new society after the Second World War.

It was conceived as “an egg in a box”, the egg being the concert hall enclosed by a free-flowing foyer. Its refurbishment has done much to reinstate the architects’ intentions, although changes to the concert hall have met with criticism.

10 Highpoint I, London (Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, 1935)

Lubetkin, a Russian émigré, arrived in London having encountered the work of Le Corbusier in Paris.

This apartment tower north of Hampstead shows that influence. Its eight storeys are animated by such modern gestures as the horizontal strip window and the cantilevered balcony.

11 Castle Drogo, Devon (Edwin Lutyens, 1930)

The last castle to be built in England, this vast pile of Devon granite commands a headland overlooking Dartmoor.

Built for the founder of the Home and Colonial stores, Drogo is at once a work of fantastic whimsy and the supreme demonstration of Lutyens’s versatility.

What saves it from the charge of theatricality is the conviction with which it is built.

12 Holland House, London (H?P Berlage, 1914 )

Commissioned by a Dutch shipping company, this office block in the City of London is the only building in Britain by one of the greatest Dutch architects. In the principal façade one can see Berlage exploring the new technology of the steel frame.

There is an unusual amount of glass, but what dominates is the green ceramic tile with which the mullions are clad. In the magical view down Bury Street these fins coalesce into a wall of masonry.

13 The School of Art, Glasgow (Charles Rennie Mackintosh 1909)

This building represents the blossoming of Mackintosh’s personal design language. He built it in two phases over 12 years and kept control of every detail. No building in Britain more powerfully exemplifies architecture as a total work of art.

14 Boundary Estate, London (London County Council Architects’ Department, 1900)

Built on the site of the Old Nichol, one of London’s most notorious slums, the Boundary Estate was the world’s first council housing. It replaced tightly-packed, crime- and disease-ridden streets with broad avenues.

15 Blackwell, Windermere (Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, 1900)

This holiday home for a Manchester brewer is an Arts and Crafts masterpiece. Its rambling form is united by sober materials, dominated by the white-painted roughcast of the walls.

The interior is as ornate as the outside is restrained. Particularly magnificent is the drawing room, which overlooks Windermere and boasts a riot of decorative plasterwork.

16 St Pancras Station and the Grand Midland Hotel, London (William Henry Barlow and Sir George Gilbert Scott, 1868)

Two great buildings, joined at the hip. In its day, Barlow’s shed was the widest single-span structure in the world while the hotel ranks as the most flamboyant expression of the prosperity of the age of rail.

Recently restored, they have never looked better.

17 Oriel Chambers, Liverpool (Peter Ellis, 1864)

One of only two known buildings by its architect, this office block was hated in its day but later lauded as an precursor to Modernism.

Its slender cast-iron frame is faced in stone and interposed with projecting oriel windows, each just wide enough to accommodate a desk.

18 Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol (Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1864)

Economic fluctuations meant that this elegant bridge wasn’t completed until 33 years after it was designed, by which point Brunel had been dead for five years.

The built scheme differs somewhat from his original – he had styled the massive towers in an Egyptian manner, a vocabulary which (perhaps thankfully) had fallen out of fashion in the interim.

19 St Vincent Street Church, Glasgow (Alexander Thomson, 1859)

This acropolis in miniature is the one surviving example of the three Presbyterian churches that its architect designed in Glasgow. The steep slope on which it sits prompted Thomson to set the body of the church and the adjoining steeple on a massive plinth.

This romantic composition is matched in freedom by the detailing which draws on sources from Greece, Egypt and India.

20 All Saints Margaret Street, London (Butterfield, 1859)

Feeling like a building that has been shoehorned into much too small a site, All Saints makes a virtue of the gawky collision of its parts.

Architectural historian John Summerson memorably described Butterfield’s achievement as being “to drag the Gothic Revival from its pedestal of scholarship and gentility and recreate it in a builder’s yard”.

Pre-dating Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace by three years, the Palm House’s structure of cast-iron and glass was hugely innovative.

Scaled to welcome every known species of palm, it is remarkable not least for its size. Its complex, bulbous shape is still a marvel, as are the filigree cast-iron galleries from which the trees can be viewed.

22 St Giles, Cheadle (A?W?N Pugin, 1846 )

Built at the expense of the Earl of Shrewsbury, St Giles is, in its architect’s words, “a perfect revival of an English parish church of the time of Edward I ”. The 200ft spire proclaims the Roman Catholic faith for miles around, while the interior testifies both to Pugin’s versatility as a decorative artist and to the depths of his client’s coffers.

“The freest neo-Grecian building in England and one of the finest in the world,” was Nikolaus Pevsner’s assessment of this vast structure. That freedom extended to Elmes’s use of a giant Corinthian order on each of the four façades – a device more Roman than Greek. Elmes won the commission when he was 25, only to die eight years later, with work ongoing. Cockerell picked up the challenge and, in the main hall, delivered one of the great public interiors of the 19th century.

24 Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (Sir John Soane, 1824)

Over the course of 32 years, Soane repeatedly remodelled three adjoining houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields for his use.

He treated them as a laboratory, testing ideas that would find application at a grander scale in projects such as the Bank of England. In the process, he conjured a warren of intimately scaled rooms. The use of mirrors and folding walls brings light deep into the house while investing it with a spellbinding sense of illusion and mystery.

25 The Circus, Bath (John Wood the Elder, 1768)

This circular arrangement of 33 grand townhouses was conceived, like all Wood’s work in Bath, as a meditation on the city’s Roman past. Its façades are those of the Colosseum turned inside out and boast three classical orders of increasing splendour, stacked one on top of another.

26 Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (Robert Adam, 1763)

Adam inherited the commission for Lord Scarsdale’s residence from James Paine. The building’s arrangement is broadly Paine’s but the development of the south façade as a notional triumphal arch is among Adam’s startling innovations. So too is the great Marble Hall, a decorated space suggesting the atrium of a Roman villa.

27 Radcliffe Camera, Oxford (James Gibbs, 1749)

Built to house the bequest of the physician, John Radcliffe, this library is the dominant element on the Oxford skyline. The notion of building a circular structure is credited to Hawksmoor, but Gibbs brought refinement to it, encompassing the drum with Corinthian columns and concluding it with an unusually elongated dome.

28 Chiswick House, London (Lord Burlington, 1729)

Acting as both architect and client, Burlington conceived his country residence as a manifesto of his architectural concerns. These centred on admiration for the work of Andrea Palladio and of Inigo Jones, the British architect most strongly indebted to Palladio’s influence.

Drawing from ancient Roman architecture and employing a precise geometric structure, Chiswick House is Palladian in conception but its delicacy and diminutive scale give it a character of its own.

29 Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland (Sir John Vanbrugh, 1729)

Designed towards the end of his life, long after such major projects as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, this house packs an extraordinary intensity of spatial effect into its compact volume. The National Trust has recently issued a public appeal for the £6.3 million that it requires to take this hugely exciting building into its ownership.

30 Christ Church Spitalfields, London (Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1729)

The bold modelling of Hawksmoor’s architecture has ensured that it remains a touchstone for contemporary designers. That quality is nowhere more evident than in this, the greatest of the six churches that he built for London’s East End. The façade presents a strange mix of Gothic and classical imagery, terminating in a faceted tower as recognisable as any in London. Hawksmoor originally envisaged the interior as supporting a double tier of galleries. In the end, only one was built but the height of the space remains, equalling that of the nave of Exeter cathedral.

31 St Stephen Walbrook, London (Christopher Wren, 1677)

St Stephen's is one of Wren's smaller city churches and its exterior - now largely buried within the surrounding urban block - is not among his most remarkable achievements. But the internal space is a joy. It is dominated by a central dome, which intersects with a series of supporting arches in a highly refined way. In the 1980s a polished stone altar designed by Henry Moore was added. Looking like something on which you could perform a human sacrifice, it contrasts rather unhappily with the delicacy of the surroundings.

32 The Queen's House Greenwich, London (Inigo Jones, 1617)

Built by James I for his wife, Anne of Denmark, this villa bears little relation to any British architecture of the period, being overwhelmingly indebted to that of the Italian, Andrea Palladio. The road to Dover originally ran directly through it at ground level.

33 Hardwick Hall, Doe Lea (Robert Smythson, 1597)

The exterior of Bess of Hardwick's house is sparely ornamented, but the lavish windows - "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", the saying went - boldly stated its owner's extraordinary wealth. Each floor is taller than the last, adding to the imposing quality of one of the greatest houses of the Elizabethan era.

34 Triangular Lodge, Rushton (Thomas Tresham, 1597)

Tresham, a devout Catholic, built this numerically obsessive little folly as a statement of his belief in the Holy Trinity. Housing three storeys, its three 33-metre walls are each capped by a triple gable. The inscription "Tres testimonium dant" can be translated either as "The number three bears witness" or as "Tresham bears witness", Tres being the pet name that Tresham's wife gave him in her letters.

35 Church of St Columba, Burntisland (1592)

The building out of which St Columba's central tower emerges could be mistaken for a large house and it is in that provocative juxtaposition of the domestic and the monumental that the church's unique character resides. A product of the Scottish reformation, it dispenses with the iconography of the Roman church and asserts the centrality of the word of God by placing the pulpit in the middle of an encompassing ring of pews.

36 King's College Chapel, Cambridge (1515)

Begun in 1446, the chapel is the only built element of a campus that Henry VI planned as a university counterpart to Eton College. Its interior takes the form of a single unbroken volume of extraordinary height and length. The decorative programme is spare, but a virtuoso display of carving articulates the building's structure in vivid fashion. The world's largest fan vault crowns the space, bearing on the impossibly narrow lengths of wall - supported by external buttresses - that separate the 24 vast side windows.

37 Abbey Church of St Mary the Virgin, Sherborne (1490 with later additions)

Although it dates back to the Saxon era, much of the Abbey's appearance is the product of remodelling by Abbot John Brunyng in the 15th century. Its stone roof incorporates the earliest major example of fan vaulting.

38 Tithe Barn, Great Coxwell (early 14th Century)

"The finest piece of architecture in England… unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder's art," said William Morris of this vast shed built by monks of the Cistercian order. Its steeply pitched slate roof bears on a double row of colossal oak beams, each fashioned from a single tree.

39 Harlech Castle, Gwynedd (Master James of St George, 1290)

If the measure of a castle's worth is its impenetrability, Harlech is surely the greatest in Britain. Built by Edward I during his conquest of Wales, it is ringed on three sides by high cliffs. Today the coastline has retreated but the sea originally extended to the castle's western boundary, allowing it to be provisioned by ship. During the War of the Roses, this enabled Harlech to withstand a seven-year siege - the longest in British history.

40 Beverley Minster (from 1220)

Regularly cited as England's most magnificent non-cathedral church, the Minster replaced an earlier structure largely demolished by the collapse of its tower in 1213. 200 years in the making, it is of a remarkably consistent Perpendicular Gothic style. The two particularly fine west towers were an inspiration behind the design of Westminster Abbey.

41 Wells Cathedral (from 1175)

Wells's principal marvel is its very broad west front, which includes more than 500 niches for sculpture. Also remarkable are the 14th-century "scissor arches", introduced to the nave as a means of stabilising the building when it was found to be sinking under the weight of the crossing tower.

42 Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire (from 1132)

One of the largest and best preserved examples of Cistercian architecture in England, Fountains Abbey housed a community of monks for four centuries until Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries. The enormous vaulted undercroft of the cellarer's range remains in particularly good condition. In the 18th century, the abbey was incorporated into Studley Royal Park, one of the masterpieces of English landscape design.

43 Abbey Church of St Mary, Tewkesbury (from 1102)

St Mary's is remarkable for having escaped destruction during the dissolution of the monasteries: the citizens of Tewkesbury maintained that they used it as a parish church and bought the building from the crown. It retains its glorious Romanesque tower and nave, although the fine vaulted roof and chancel date from the 14th century.

44 Durham Cathedral (from 1093)

This crowning achievement of the Romanesque era stands on high ground overlooking the River Wear. In the rib vaulting over its nave one finds the masons experimenting with structural techniques from which the filigree language of Gothic architecture would later develop. Durham remains, however, a building of palpable mass: nowhere more so than in the truly vast cylindrical columns that line the nave, each incised with a bold geometrical pattern.

45 Ely Cathedral (from 1082)

Elevated on an eminence that commands a vast expanse of pancake-flat fenland, the cathedral at Ely enjoys a setting as dramatic as that of any in the country. Its profile is equally distinctive - a single high tower rises at its west end, while a smaller octagonal lantern marks the crossing of the nave and transepts. This was a replacement for the original crossing tower, which collapsed in 1322.

46 Christchurch Priory (from 650)

This large parish church is an encyclopedia of architectural styles. Little from the Saxon period remains but the early 13th-century misericords (wood-carved seats, featuring scenes such as a fox preaching to a flock of geese) are the oldest examples in England. Dating from the mid-14th century is a carved screen depicting the family tree of Jesse and from the 15th, the Gothic Lady Chapel. Pugin was a fan of Christchurch and when his first wife died in childbirth he buried her here and donated a wooden altar table of his own design.

47 Hadrian's Wall (122-128)

The most significant remaining monument of the Roman occupation of Britain, the wall originally ran for 117 kilometres and marked the northern boundary of the Roman empire.

48 Broch, Mousa (c100BC)

Standing on one of the now uninhabited Shetland Islands, this extraordinarily well-preserved structure is built of dry-stone walling. Its concentric circular walls rise to a height of 12 metres and taper inwards, giving it a profile akin to that of a cooling tower. Its original function remains in doubt - some archaeologists suggest that it was defensive, others that it was a monument to a chief.

49 Stonehenge, Wiltshire (c2600BC)

The purpose for which Britain's most significant prehistoric monument was built remains hotly contested. An instrument for astronomical observation, a site of healing and a stage for religious rituals are among the current theories.

50 Skara Brae, Orkney (3100BC)

A storm in the winter of 1850 stripped the grass from a large mound at the Bay of Skaill, revealing the most complete neolithic village in Europe. The walls of the 10 houses were cut into mounds of domestic waste, for insulation against the Orkney climate. The village was served by a rudimentary drainage system and many of the houses have built-in stone furniture.